In a continuing effort to improve the quality of shipping fruits, I, the inventor, typically hybridize a large number of peach, nectarine, plum, apricot, and cherry seedlings each year. I also grow a lesser number of open pollinated seeds of each of these fruits. The present invention relates to a new and distinct variety of interspecific tree, which has been denominated varietally as ‘Plumsweet XIV’.
During a typical blooming season I isolate as seed parents both individual and groups of different plum trees by covering them with screen houses. A hive of bees is placed inside each such house, and bouquets to provide pollen from different plum, apricot, and interspecific hybrid trees are placed in buckets near the trees approximately every two days for the duration of the bloom. During 2003 one tree of ‘26P166’ (unpatented) plum was crossed by me in this manner. To pollinate this isolated tree, I selected bouquets from several sources of apricot and interspecific hybrid trees without keeping specific written details. Upon reaching maturity the fruit from this plum tree was harvested and the seeds were removed, cracked, stratified and germinated as a group with the label “H13”. They were grown as seedlings on their own root in my greenhouse and upon reaching dormancy transplanted to a cultivated area of my experimental orchard located near Le Grand, Calif. in Merced County (San Joaquin Valley). During the summer of 2007 the claimed variety was selected by me as a single plant from the group of seedlings described above. Subsequent to origination of the present variety of interspecific tree, I asexually reproduced it by budding and grafting in the experimental orchard described above, and such reproduction of plant and fruit characteristics were true to the original plant in all respects. The reproduction of the variety included the use of ‘Nemaguard’ (unpatented) rootstock upon which the present variety was compatible and true to type.
The present variety is similar to its seed parent, ‘26P166’ plum (unpatented) by being self-unfruitful and producing fruit that is firm, juicy, mostly red in skin color, and ripens in the mid season, but is quite distinguished therefrom by producing fruit that is sweeter, firmer, and dark red instead of yellow in flesh color.
The present variety is most similar to ‘Plumsweet XI’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 19,796) interspecific tree by being self-unfruitful and producing fruit that is sweet and excellent in flavor, red in primary skin color, and clingstone in type, but is quite distinguished therefrom by blooming about 7 days later and by producing fruit that is globose instead of oblate in shape, that has more green in the background skin color, and that matures about twenty-two days later.